[ Atariscne.org - News ] Pator just does it! Bitphase - a new Atari (not only) tracker
The overly talented AY-musician Pator active on the published am alpha version of a new AY/YM tracker working in the webrowser. Bitphase has a slick interface and comes with full pattern and instrument editor. This looks like a modern and flexible solution for creating AY/YM tracks.
The slick Bitphase frontend
You will find a few demo tracks in the tracker, e.g. Pator's great Kizuna track he did for the related SMFX/Joker demo.
Also, there are good news in Atari matters. Timer effect support is on the plan, and of course those timer based sounds are made exportable as well. While the track has .psg export, just today spkr/SMFX put a cherry on the cake and implemented .sndh support. So we have a new Atari tracker I would say!
SNDH-export - the most important feature, obviously!
All this raised our interest, so with the help of spkr/smfx we were able to conduct a quick interview with the creator himself!
Hello Pator! You are known as a well known musician in the AY-chip, and this tracker coded by you came quite as a surprise. What's your motivation behind it? Are you unhappy with existing tools and what do you think makes this tracker special?
I'm unhappy with vortex tracker not having good code for further expansions. So i had some ideas like virtual channels and in future sid sound but this delphi code isnt too easy to add improvements. I had to ask wbcbz for some additions, but then figured out its easier if I had my own tool that I could expand.
On top of that , its windows only exe, so on my macbook i have to use wine which makes ayumi (ay engine used in vortex tracker, also in bitphase) very slow. When compiled under WASM and running on the web, its always running good no matter the OS.
Another motivation is that whenever we made a tune for chip compos in Otomata Labs group, like TSFM (2xAY + 2xFM) tune or 2xAY 200hz tune, we had to use furnace (some people in our group are more familiar with it) - and modify its sources every time. now we can have an AY pocket knife that will support whatever we want.
And also as a bonus - i was bored and want to code something cool;)
Well, thats an adequate reason and I guess you managed that! Very nice looking tool and attitude! :) Can you elaborate a bit more on any special features? Anything more that you wanted to improve on trackers from a musicians perspective?
When composing tracks, i often had an idea for some command, some workflow improvement, i wanted to add everything i found while doing tracks but never could (example - env arp command while doing Kizuna track, or dynamic table generation needed for Sinclair QL)
And Virtual channels? What's this?
About virtual channels - the most basic example:
You have virtual channel A, virtual channel B.
virtual channel B plays some bass
virtual channel A plays a kick and snare
Whenever kick or snare plays, bass is interrupted with a kick or snare, if kick/snare ends it brings up bass back. This is tick-precise so you don't need to mix everything manually at single channel like in VT2, you dont need to create instruments that mix both kick and bass at the same time ... etc
Sounds interesting and reminds me a bit to full side chaining and yes, I can imagine scenarios where this comes very handy and saves quite some manual work.
Any further commands and functions you longed for, implemented?
About special features: the most important thing I wanted to have is an ability to run every command in tracker not only on tones, but also on envelopes. think of vibrato, portamento, anything. thats how I did envelope arpeggios in Kizuna. So I included a special envelope column with envelope effects that work directly on envelope values in the register, instead of on the tone. in Vortex Tracker 2, I had to do some work around and calculate envelope register values myself, instead of using some dedicated feature.
For future, I would love to bring other chips into the mix. especially ones that often appear in nature alongside AY. TSFM is a perfect example - its a ZX expansion board board that contains 2xYM2203C chips, and their PSGs contain both internal implementation of our beloved YM chip and also OPN FM. There is currently no tracker that supports this. When doing a tune for it single time in my life with Otomata Labs group, we had to hack furnace a lot to make it happen. That leads to "fork hell" where you cant just share your module to your friends without explaining to them how to install a specific version of the tracker 😃
Well, seems this misery led to something good! Atari browser tracking here we come! Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions and all the best for the project! Oh, and keep up the great music, too!
🔗 Bitphase tracker
PS: Thanks to spkr/smfx for the hint, help (and the sndh export)!